Abstract
30 years since the regime change: beyond an occasion and a topic of academic and political discussions, this period also constitutes the lifetime of a generation. Connecting socio-economic analysis with their own position as members of this generation, the authors provide an account of postsocialist transformation in Romania. Against interpretations that conceive communism as a system separate from the capitalist world economy, and understand transition as a story of “returning to capitalism”, the chapter depicts the specific ways in which communist Romania’s internal development was tied to changing geopolitical and world-economic partnerships. Within this process, authors trace their own generational experience as marked by three overlap** crises of structural processes: the profitability crisis of the post-1945 global cycle that starts in the 1970s, the crisis of the communist model of rapid industrialization; and the social crisis built up by global neoliberalization, into which postsocialist societies entered with the highest hopes of freedom and capitalist welfare.
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Notes
- 1.
See the key text for this orientation, Howe, N.,Strauss, W. 2000. Millennials rising. The great next generation. New York: Vintage Books.
- 2.
A term coined by Raymond Williams (1977).
- 3.
The “last soviet generation” is a term introduced by Alexei Yurchak to describe the experiences of Soviet citizens born between the 1950s and early 1970s. Hence, both in terms of temporality and conception our understanding is different. We refer to the last Communist generation in order to speak about people roughly born in the last decade of Romanian Communism, during its terminal decline. See Yurchak (2006).
- 4.
Keir Milburn similarly, and quite tellingly, overlooks this aspect in his investigation of the rise of a new generation of left-wing movements and activists. He sees this trend only pertaining to the West (US, UK and Spain) whereas eastern Europe is, mistakenly, reduced to cohort of youngsters who vote for the extreme right. See Milburn (2019).
- 5.
A similar effort was employed by Andrew Janos, though we diverge from his perspective since we are indebted to a historical materialist understanding. See Janos (2000).
- 6.
There is a vast literature here, but see the classic Arendt (1973).
- 7.
Examples abound here, but see Mandel and Humphrey (2002).
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Domşodi, D., Poenaru, F. (2022). Life in Transition and in Crisis. The Political Autobiography of a Generation. In: Gagyi, A., Slačálek, O. (eds) The Political Economy of Eastern Europe 30 years into the ‘Transition’. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78915-2_2
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